By Jim Geraghty
Monday, November 30, 2020
Sunday morning, President Trump called in to Maria
Bartiromo’s program on Fox News and laid out his account of what happened in
the 2020 presidential election:
A glitch is supposed to be when a
machine breaks down. Well, no, we had glitches where they moved thousands of
votes from my account to Biden’s account. And these are glitches. So, they’re
not glitches. They’re theft. They’re fraud, absolute fraud. And there were many
of them, but, obviously, most of them tremendous amounts, got by without us
catching. We got lucky to catch them. I think we caught four or five glitches
of about 5,000 votes each, and different states. And, again, they’re not
glitches . . . This election was over. And then they did dumps. They call them
dumps, big, massive dumps, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and all over. If you take
a look at — you just take a look at just about every state that we’re talking
about, every swing state that we’re talking about. And they did these massive
dumps of votes. And, all of a sudden, I went from winning by a lot to losing by
a little.
. . . We’re talking — there are a
lot of dead people that so-called voted in this election. But dead people were,
in some cases, in many, many cases, thousands of cases, voted, but, also, dead
people made application to vote. They were dead 10 years, 15 years, and they
actually made application. This is total fraud. And how the FBI and Department
of Justice — I don’t know. Maybe they are involved. But how people are allowed
to get away from this stuff — with this stuff is unbelievable. This election
was rigged. This election was a total fraud. And it continues to be, as they
hide. And the problem we have, we go to judges, and people don’t want to get
involved . . .
. . . they had judges making deals.
And they had electoral officials making deals, like this character in Georgia,
who is a disaster. And the governor’s done nothing. He’s done absolutely
nothing. I’m ashamed that I endorsed him. But you — I look at what’s going on.
It’s so terrible. They stuffed the ballot boxes. You know, I have been hearing
that expression for many years. You have too, stuffed the ballot — they stuffed
the ballot boxes. And they used COVID as a means to stuff the ballot boxes. Joe
Biden did not get 16 million more votes than Barack Hussein Obama. He didn’t
get it.
Since Election Day, President Trump has repeatedly
insisted that the election was a fraud, rigged, or stolen, and that massive
numbers of votes for him were secretly switched to Biden by the voting machines
or by the officials running the elections in the counties. Yet his legal team
has not made these assertions in court, nor have they presented any evidence in
court that persuaded any judges. The legal team’s much more limited efforts,
disputing much smaller numbers of votes, have almost entirely failed.
President Trump also wants his supporters to go out and
vote for incumbent Republican Georgia senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler
in the runoff elections in January. It is hard to see why. If Democrats, along
with corrupt Republicans, along with every election official in the state, and
every county official and local volunteer, and the management of the Dominion
voting machines, and perhaps the Venezuelan government, and perhaps the
Department of Justice and FBI and whatever other co-conspirators all worked together
to steal the state from Trump . . . why would they not also steal the election
for the Democrats running for Senate?
What is the point of voting if the elections are rigged,
as the president insists?
If the president is telling the truth, why should Georgia
Republicans participate in the charade of an election scheduled for January 5?
And if the president isn’t telling the truth . . . why
shouldn’t Georgia Republicans — or anyone else — come out and say that he isn’t
telling the truth?
China Hopes You Forget
How This Whole Pandemic Thing Started
The Guardian notices that in China, “state
media has been reporting intensively on coronavirus discovered on packaging of
frozen food imports, not considered a significant vector of infection
elsewhere, and research into possible cases of the disease found outside
China’s borders before December 2019.” The Chinese government really wants the
world to believe that the virus jumped into humans in some other country, was
brought into China, and only then attracted attention with the outbreak in
Wuhan.
That Guardian article pours cold water on a theory
offered earlier this month that the coronavirus reached Italy months before the
outbreak in Wuhan:
Reports of Covid circulating in
Italy in autumn 2019, based on samples from a cancer unit, seem “weak”, said
Prof Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
“The serological data [from Italy] can most likely be explained by
cross-reactive antibodies directed against other coronaviruses.” In other
words, antibodies found in the cases in Italy had been triggered in individuals
who had been infected by different coronaviruses, not those responsible for
Covid-19.
You may recall that back in June, a study that had not yet
been peer-reviewed suggested that SARS-CoV-2 had been found in the sewage of
Barcelona way back in March 2019. I was skeptical then, and since June there
has been almost no follow-up coverage or additional research, and the original
study still hasn’t been peer reviewed. This thread from June lays out the
evidence that the study’s testing either was not precise enough or had a
false-positive testing result.
As the trail to the virus’s origin grows colder, what
we’ve learned about the virus adds new complications to the hunt for that
origin — and in Beijing, we’re already dealing with a dishonest authoritarian
government that is determined to cover up anything that could reflect badly
upon the country.
Right now, doctors believe that roughly 40 percent of
people who catch SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic. If 40 percent of people
consistently don’t develop symptoms across all populations, tracking down
“Patient Zero” — the first human being to be infected — is even trickier. At
some point, the virus jumped from an animal — probably a bat or pangolin — or
animal tissue to a human being, creating Patient Zero. But there’s a roughly
four in ten chance that patient zero never felt sick, didn’t know he (or she)
had the virus, and went about his life . . . spreading the virus to someone
else. And that person had a four in ten chance of being asymptomatic as well,
and so on. (There’s also a decent possibility that an infected person only
develops mild symptoms and thinks it’s a routine cold or the usual flu.)
Authorities only learn about the existence of the virus when someone suffers
from the virus badly enough to go to a hospital. The first onset of symptoms in
the first hospitalized patient was December 1, 2019, according to The Lancet.
But Patient Zero may not know he is “patient zero,”
because he never got sick.
For those who subscribe to the “lab accident” theory,
those same odds apply to lab technicians as well. If someone mishandles
biohazardous material . . . there’s a four in ten chance they didn’t develop
symptoms. That person may not have even known they mishandled the material! And
then that lab technician goes on to interact with other people, who interact
with other people . . . until someone develops symptoms severe enough to go to
the hospital.
Between the inherent challenges in tracking the spread of
the virus, lack of cooperation from China, and the world’s seeming lack of
interest in tracking down the origin, we may never definitively know where
SARS-CoV-2 originated. And we will remain as vulnerable to another virus as we
were to this one a year ago.
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